Everyone talks a lot about customer experience (CX) and their “dedication” to it.
The question remains, is your organization truly committed to it?
Listed below are 7 promises that you need to be acting on for your customers to believe that you are committed to providing them with the best experience.
How many are you meeting today?
- I promise to listen to my customers and act on their feedback
- I promise to understand my customer’s journey
- I promise to put my employees first; and empower them to help the customer
- I promise to define and communicate my brand promise
- I promise to get executive commitment for my customer experience initiatives
- I promise to communicate with my customers on an on-going basis
- I promise to eliminate bad policies and rules that negatively impact my CX
If you’re not meeting these, no need to worry. You’re not the only one. It is important to realize which ones you are NOT meeting, and look at ways that you can address them going forward. Check out some of our tips below!
Listening to Act: Everybody knows that you must provide your customers with a feedback mechanism, whether that’s a survey, online reviews, etc. So, ask yourself: are you simply COLLECTING customer feedback? Or are you really DOING something about that feedback? The number one rule we always tell our clients is NOT to collect something you don’t intend to USE. If your customers go through the trouble of telling you what they’d like you to change, and then you ignore that. It’s obvious, to them, that you don’t care about their thoughts. Don’t be that company to your customers – it only gives them one more reason to look at switching.
Understanding the Customer Journey: Where do your customers feel pain in their interactions with you? In the purchase process? When dealing with an issue? Renewals? Your website? There’s a variety of interactions your customers have with you daily, and as well as you think you are doing right now, there’s SOMEWHERE your customers are experiencing pain. Do you know where it is? If not, check out our Customer Journey Map template so you can get started!
Help Employees, Help Your Customers: Your front-line staff are the ones who are interacting with your customers every day. Are they empowered to solve their problems? If not, you have some low hanging fruit in this area. Obviously, this is a large organizational change, but one worth taking if you truly want every member of your team to be able to provide the best customer experience possible!
Communicating Brand Promises: You’re making brand promises internally all the time with your vision, mission, and strategic goals. But, do your customers know anything about that? If you don’t communicate your brand promises to your customers, they can never hold you accountable for reaching them, OR for providing feedback in areas that matter. Not sure you want to communicate them because you know you’re not meeting them? Time to look at your strategies, or change your promises.
Executive Commitment: How many of your initiatives have suffered due to lack of executive commitment? Every company has at least one (if not many). To get that executive commitment, you need to make a business case for either: 1) the brand value, 2) decrease in costs, or 3) increase in revenues. So, look at where your customer experience initiatives fall, and work with your vendors and partners to identify where you find the win. Then, communicate it to the executive team in a simple way!
On-going Communication: Ask yourself, when do I most often communicate with my customers? You’ll probably find that the answer is in 2 primary places: 1) when something is wrong, and 2) when I want something from them. Ooh – that doesn’t sound super enticing from the customer perspective. When do they get communications on the things that could HELP them, in a PROACTIVE way? If they aren’t, back to the drawing board on the Customer Journey to identify where these communications make sense. Just make sure you’re not ONLY communicating with them in the bad times.
Eliminate the Waste: While working through the first 6 points, you will likely have identified (even just by reading this post) areas of your organization where you acknowledge customer experience waste – efforts, policies and rules that use resources but are not creating a positive interaction. This is where we come back to the operational commitment – are you willing to make the change to support this? If not, are you really dedicated to your customer experience?
Interested in more ways to understand your current customer experience? Your SPLICE Account Team is here to support you – just reach out when you’re ready to start creating the best customer experience possible!